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Get your genealogy motors going… there are a bunch of record collections that are currently FREE on Ancestry.com. If you have not yet started working on Ancestry, you will need to sign up for an account before you can search the records. It is free to sign up, though if you wish to continue searching these collections (+ other collections, photos, and more later on) you will need to purchase a subscription).

Here’s a list of the collections available for free:

It’s really simple to find your ancestors too.
Just plug in a bit of information and there ya go!

Need help or have any questions? Leave a comment or send an email. I’m happy to help.

*Free access is open to U.S. residents only and ends 11:59pm ET on December 29th.

So you may have heard that Ancestry is planning to discontinue their Family Tree Maker (FTM for short) program. They will stop selling it at the end of this year, but it will still be usable. However at the beginning of 2017 all of the features associated with FTM will stop working.

I understand Ancestry deciding to not provide future versions of the program or even updates of the current version, but to make it stop working entirely? That means they have to change code on Ancestry.com to stop letting FTM work. They are making work for themselves to make something stop working. It just doesn’t make sense.

I’m not a huge user of FTM. Mostly because when I upgraded to FTM 2014 my tree did not properly set up and though the program says my tree is synced with the one online, it actually isn’t. Support members in the Ancestry forums could only recommend that I de-link the tree’s, download the Gedcom from Ancestry, then re-upload under a different name to the Ancestry website and link it to the FTM program. And yeah that would have worked, but my tree would be under a name I didn’t want, as well as none of the documentation, photo’s, etc coming with it and I didn’t/don’t have the money to get a year’s membership and redo everything. So I stuck with just working on my tree on Ancestry.com. Honestly I mostly worked on my tree there anyway and only used FTM when I needed to create files, like event lists, or to create family outlines, etc. If I need to do that now, I just re-upload the current Gedcom to FTM. After FTM is discontinued, I’ll have to find another program to do all that.

What’s your take on FTM being discontinued? Are you a current user? If so, what do you plan to do when it goes away in about a year? Let me know in the comments.